"You see, what happened here," says Carrigan, "is that now these people were in effect running their own small businesses. They had set their own budgets, and they had to live with them. If they wanted to complain, they had to complain to themselves. This is above all an awareness program. Every little bit counts, and only the people here can make the numbers work."
* * *
Getting people to make the numbers work is, of course, a major goal of the Great Game of Business. It is one, moreover, that the employees of SRC routinely achieve. Day in, day out, they run their drills so smartly, so effortlessly, so smoothly that an outsider is tempted to think of them as natural athletes, participating in a sport they were born to play. Watching them, it is difficult to image that, a few years ago, SRC was teetering on the brink of disaster.
But Stack remembers.
It was January 1979, and Stack, then 30 years old, had just arrived as the new plant manager. SRC was foundering badly. Opened by International Harvester in 1974 to remanufacture diesel engines and engine components for its truck and agricultural and construction equipment dealers, the plant had lost $2 million in the most recent fiscal year, and the big question was whether the employees, previously nonunion, would vote to join the Teamsters or the United Auto Workers in an election scheduled for March.
Stack had been given six months to determine whether the plant should be scrapped or saved. On his first day, he held a meeting in the cafeteria for all 140 plant employees. "I was giving them this Knute Rockne routine," he recalls, "and when I looked out over the crowd, I felt like I was looking into an aquarium. Totally immobile faces." At the end of his remarks, he asked for questions. There was a pause; then someone in the back hollered, "How old are you anyhow?"
"That was the only question I got," says Stack. "I knew then it wasn't going to be easy."
But Stack was not without experience in such matters. Four years earlier, at the age of 26, he had been named superintendent of the machining division of Harvester's Melrose Park, Ill., plant. There he had found himself in charge of five general foremen, all more than 50 years old; roughly 400 employees; and a division that ranked last in productivity out of seven divisions in the plant. Hoping to stimulate their competitive juices, Stack had hit on the idea of giving each foreman a copy of the division's daily productivity figures, broken down by foreman and then compared in total with the other six divisions. Productivity began to soar. The first time the foremen beat the previous high score, Stack bought them coffee; the second time, he bought them coffee and doughnuts; the third time, he invited them all to his house for poker, pizza, and beer. Within three months, Stack's division had risen from last to first place in the plant's productivity rankings. Thus was born the Great Game of Business.
By the time Stack got to Springfield, he had refined the concept somewhat, but he could not yet apply it to SRC. The place was in a shambles. Thanks to a critical shortage of parts, production had nearly stopped. "But the people wanted to work," says Stack. "Most of them had come off the farms. They were dedicated, hardworking people, and they were disgusted because they didn't have the tools to work with. The only reason they wanted the union was that they thought it might get them the tools they needed."
Stack convinced them otherwise. "It was very sophisticated," he says. "Me and the other managers got down on our hands and knees out on the shop floor and begged them to give us a shot."
"At least he was talking to us," says 27-year-old Randy Rossner, now a fuel-injection pump assembler. "Before, we didn't see much of anybody out here. It was as if nobody cared. Jack looked like somebody we could work with." Most of Rossner's colleagues evidently agreed. The union proposal was defeated by a 75% margin. Meanwhile, Stack managed to finagle a supply of spare parts from his erstwhile cronies in Melrose Park. So SRC's production line went back up to speed. "Now," says Stack, "we had to start winning."
Before they could start winning, however, they had to create the Game. Stack began by choosing three modest goals, which he called "accountabilities": product quality, safety, and housekeeping (meaning the organization and cleanliness of each work area). In addition, management cobbled together some production goals. Stack's purpose in all this was to focus attention on common objectives, and to suggest in some small way that performance could be measured. "Things were in such disarray," he says, "you had to start with something. We needed something to celebrate."
And celebrate they did. On the afternoon marking 100,000 hours without a recordable accident, the plant closed down for a beer bust. The theme song from Rocky played over the loudspeaker system, and members of the safety committee marched around, handing out fire extinguishers. Forklift trucks festooned with crepe paper were driven in a parade through the plant as onlookers cheered.
The celebrating continued as departments began exceeding their production goals. The department that won by the highest percentage was given an award -- the "Traveling Trophy," a huge confection in marble and brass, topped off by a winged goddess holding a torch. Whenever the award changed hands, the winning department would strut en masse to the ex-winners' department and carry off the trophy amid much self-congratulatory brouhaha.
